Good afternoon. What a tremendous honor to be invited to share such an important day with you. I did not go to school here, but I’ve been here a lot, interviewing students and administrators, taking part in events. This is a special place, and I’m so happy to be invited to speak to you today. I was here last shooting a story, Marshall for All, tackling the tough questions about student debt and what Marshall is doing to make college affordable. So, I am happy to be talking to the class of 2025.
Today, you are surrounded by those who love you best and who really are responsible for getting you this far. Your parents, your grandparents, your siblings, your friends. And it is because of them, because of their love and their support, their pushing you, at times, that you are now positioned for the futures that you’re now facing. And to the grandparents and the parents, I know that you’re in the audience looking down on this group of graduates here. Your baby is about to graduate. I know the feeling of this day, I had four kids, watched them grow. I know what it feels like. Your baby is leaving the nest. They’re off to their real lives.
But today, I would like to lay your fears to rest. They are not really leaving, And I am not speaking metaphorically. Literally, they are not leaving. They will be in your home, with their laundry, with their friends, hanging out on your furniture over and over again, year after year. They are not leaving. Between now and I’m guess probably like age 40, they’re going to be living back in their bedrooms probably a couple of times.
And for you students, you may feel like today is the end of an era. A day where you say goodbye to your community, say goodbye to the friends that you’ve made, say goodbye to your school. And I would like to lay your fears to rest. You’re not really saying goodbye. Someone from the Alumni Association is here today on this stage, and they are going to hit you up for money. The Alumni Association is going to follow you on X, and on Instagram, and on Facebook, which you guys are not on yet, but you will be when you’re older. They are going to send you, literally, a barrage of emails about fundraisers because you are about to be alums. You have jobs, you have actual money that does not belong to your parents, and that means that you are now potential donors.
Those of you who are going to work in business where you’ll be slogging it out one hundred hours a week in your first jobs where your own moms will not be able to get in touch with you, I promise you, the Alumni Association will track you down. Those of you who are going to work in nonprofits, to remote parts of the globe. You may not have working Wi-Fi, and probably not cell service, but trust me. The Alumni Association is absolutely going to find you.
Now, I know how this sort of works. I come up here, I’m supposed spout some brilliance, and you guys, sitting there, should absorb it all like a sponge. But I’ll tell you. I tend not to give advice, and I’ll tell you why. So many years ago, I was asked by a women’s magazine if I could tell them the best advice my mom had ever given me. I said, “I think that’s a bad idea.” And they’re like, “No, no, we’ll do a half page spread, you and your mom hugging on the front. ‘Best advice my mom ever gave me.’” And my mom, who is an immigrant from Cuba, and was a very tough nut. Not a warm, fuzzy mom. More like, tough, survivor, first in her family to go off to college, scrappy. And so I said, “I really think this is a bad idea.” And they said, “No, this is a great idea. What is the best advice your mom ever gave you?” And I said, “Okay, my mother’s best advice was most people are idiots.” The editor, and I had the editor on the phone, said, “Oh. Okay, we’ll call you back.”
But it was true, it was the best advice my mom ever gave me because I think that many people will tell you and spend their lives telling you what you cannot do, what you should not do, what you will never be able to accomplish. They’ll tell you why your ideas won’t work, why you’ll fail when you’ve tried something you’ve never tried before, and her point was those people are idiots and you should not listen to them.
And I think my mom would’ve been in a position to know. My parents, my mom and dad, passed away in 2019 within 40 days of each other. But they were both immigrants to this country. My mom was Black and from Cuba, my dad was White and from Australia. And they met because they both went to daily mass. My mom would walk, but my dad had a car. And every day, he’d drive by and wind down the windows in his car and try to pick her up on the way to church. I can’t really clean that up. And he would say, “Would you like a ride?” And she would say, “No thank you.” Every day. And then one day, she said yes. And they—my father being no fools—made a date to go on a date with her.
But that night, every single restaurant, it was in Baltimore, in Maryland, in 1958, every single restaurant turned them away because my mom was Black, and my dad was White. And they would say to my father, “Well, you can come in.” But to my mother, “You can’t come in. And certainly, you can’t come in together.” And so my mom, eventually, being turned away from every restaurant, took my father back to her apartment. She tells this story all the time. And she whipped up a meal of Cuban food, ‘cause she was an amazing cook. And she would tell me and my three sisters, and her entire point was: so you see girls, if you can cook, you can get a man. I can’t really cook. I like to say, I can’t make it but I can make it happen. DoorDash.
My parents decided that they would get married at the end of 1958 when interracial marriage was illegal in the state they lived in—Maryland—and sixteen other states. And so they drove to Washington, D.C. and got hitched. And then drove back to Baltimore and lived illegally in Baltimore. And when their friends said to them, “Well, whatever you do, don’t have kids. Biracial children will not fit in this world.” I’m number five of six kids. My parents were terrible listeners, every step of the way. And so, from that I have learned do not listen to other people’s take on the life that you should lead.
My parents were excellent role models in not listening, and so I won’t tell you what advice I’d give you, but I will tell you what I’ve seen. By not listening, you can figure out what your heart is telling you to do. When I was a student, I was studying English and American literature, and I was pre-med, and then I realized that telling stories was my passioned, so I switched and started interning at a local TV station, It kinda worked out. Now, I travel the world telling stories. Stories about important bold-faced, named people, but the ones I really like are the stories about people doing amazing things through sports and through adversity, and sometimes without a lot of hope, without many options. These are the stories that I think are the best, about persistence and perseverance. Because my mom and dad modelled it, and for me and my siblings, at every turn.
Not taking advice means that you’re going to break free of boundaries, the walls that exist that make us feel like we’re different from other people we meet. And not taking advice you’re going to stop looking for meaning in things that have no meaning. Listen, some relationships are just not meant to be. Delete that number from your phone and move on. Bad things sometimes happen to people, and to good people, and they will continue to happen until good people get in the way. And I’ve seen this time and time again in every story that I’ve covered, so be that good person.
Decide what you want to be, and I’m not talking about a job, I’m talking about the kind of person you want to be. It is up to you, and no one else. People can be mean, things can be unfair, but I think far more people are good, and they’re generous, and they’re helpful, and they’re hopeful, and that means you’re going to have to lead with an open heart. And it also means that that little heart is probably going to get stomped on a few more times than you would like.
If you go where your passion and where your heart leads you, I guarantee you, you will have some incredible experiences. I have. Leaning in, as people like to say, is not just a strategy for people in business and their careers. I think it is good advice for everybody. But I would add lean in to use your voice and lean in to make change where it needs to be made, and lean in to invest your heart and your soul in ideas and in people that maybe others don’t care for, or maybe they don’t even see the value in. Because leaning back, when you’re young, is just another word for cynicism. And that’s not very clever when you’ve been given the advantages that you have all been given through a great education, since you’re sitting here.
In 1958, my mom and dad, who were now living as a married couple in Baltimore. My mom used to tell me the story of how people would spit on them as she would walk down the street with my older sisters. And I would say to her, “Oh my gosh, mom, how did you deal with that? What did you do?” And she would say, “Oh, lovey.” She called me “lovey.” “Oh, lovey, we knew America was better than that.” Meaning, we knew we had to be part of helping it get there. And that’s what it was about. She knew that when you are knocked off your path, anytime somebody spit on you, literally or metaphorically, you were going to have to figure out a way. You might not get where you’re trying to go if you keep stopping.
‘Cause she had a dream, which was the American dream. A dream that she would realize, coming out of poverty in Cuba where she was the only child in her family of five to go to school and to get opportunity, and then all six of her kids graduated from college, and all twenty-two of her grandchildren graduating from college, having more chances to live lives that were never even possible for an immigrant who was Black and a woman in the 1950’s.
So please, as my mother would advise you, if she were here, don’t listen to idiots. Figure out your dreams and then be brave enough to go and live them. Otherwise, as a friend told me the other day, someone might hire you to help them with their dream. And that doesn’t sound quite as fulfilling, does it?
Today you begin new and amazing things, and maybe you also begin a fair amount of mundane crap, too. I mean, listen, you should know how to put ink in the printer. You should know that grabbing coffee for the team is a very good skill. I spent my first year out of college answering phones and removing staples from the walls of a local station in Boston using that thingy, I don’t know what it’s called. But my dream was to tell stories of people whose stories weren’t often told, people like my mom. Like many people in this audience, people who are on the cusp of amazing things, if they decide to be brave and committed to what life could be unfettered from the expectations of others. And truly unafraid.
What I have seen in my career, whether covering tsunamis in Asia, or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or earthquakes in Haiti, is that pretty much, around the world, everybody wants the same thing. We’re more alike, actually, than we’re different. You need to break through walls that you think exist between people who don’t look like you and don’t act like you because those walls don’t have to exist. You need to seek to understand why people act like they do and why they do what they do and meet people where they are. You don’t always have to agree, but I think, I have learned, that having conversations is the only way to bridge the distance in understanding each other.
Not taking advice means you can choose to stand up for people who need your voice, and you’ll have chances, unfortunately, every single day to do this, and say, “This is not okay.” Or you can choose to walk by and avert your eyes when you see an injustice, big or small. So be that person who stops, and at the risk of not voicing a popular opinion, say, “This is not okay. This not okay ‘cause America is better than that.”
You have a great education if you are sitting here, and I think that means you have an obligation because not everybody has had the chance that you got to have. And that obligation means that you have the power to help others who have not been quite so lucky, who maybe haven’t had quite as many breaks as you have managed to have. So, use your voice in defense of others who cannot speak for themselves.
Don’t let people kill your joy. You will find them; they will glom onto your shoe like a piece of gum on the sidewalk. So, I’d advise you, starting today, remove people from your life who make you feel bad about who you are and what you want to be, what you want to accomplish. Don’t let people steal your joy from life.
You have your whole lives ahead of you to do well and to do good in this world, to be great and to be good to others, and find greatness and seek out goodness in other people. Because it is all around us. Some days, it’s hard to find, I will admit, but it’s there. Tomorrow will be a day of big questions. Who do you want to be? What do you want to stand for? You have been positioned, by virtue of this university and this class of 2025, by all the things that you’ve achieved and all the obstacles that you have been able to push through, you have bee positioned to do great things. And I think if you ultimately are able to do them selflessly, and in the service of others, that is really what will make you great. Congratulations to the class of 2025, go Herd.
Neither the Catt Center nor Iowa State University is affiliated with any individual in the Archives or any political party. Inclusion in the Archives is not an endorsement by the center or the university.